… the vital importance of the difference between a goal for therapy and a desired outcome. He discuses it in the context of working with a couple who appeared to have mutually opposing or exclusive goals.

What a simple idea, and perhaps something we already know in an illusive way. Elliott’s teaching and examples in the video are just excellent.

$1,000,000 = Goal

Peace of mind = Outcome

*

Gets me thinking… he is showing us an example of assisting people to deeper into their being and sharing more. I like the SF questions.

I wonder if couples themselves using the universal space opening question: “Is there more?” would go from the goal to the outcome?

That way couple can do their own deep listening, with one question: Is there more?

This can be done – partner to partner. If they succeed they may get more confidence and hope for their relationship.

Tim O’Reilly: Let me go back to George Simon because a lot of what he taught was a kind of mental discipline that was rooted in a model of how consciousness happens. It was framed somewhat in the language of Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics. Korzybski drew this wonderful diagram – it was actually a tool he used to train people – that he called the structural differential.

Korzybski’s fundamental idea was that people are stuck in language, but language is about something. And so, he represented what he called the process of abstraction so that people could ask themselves, “Where am I in that process?” So, the first part of the structural differential was a parabola, and the reason why it was a parabola is because reality is infinite, but we can’t take in all of reality.

And so, hanging from the parabola was a circle, and the circle was our experience, which is our first abstraction from reality. And then, hanging from the circle are a bunch of label-shaped tags – multiple strings of them – and these are the words that we use to describe our experience.

Korzybski’s training was for people to recognize when they were in the words, when they were in the experience, and when they were open to the reality. George mixed that in with this work of Sri Aurobindo, who was an Indian sage, and had come up with a model that integrated a spiritual view of this, and a practice which was just listening and being open to the unknown.

Nice response, but I think he has a misguided approach to ownership. This bit got me blogging:

The genius of modern finance has been to create corporate ownership arrangements that allow basically anyone, including the government, to own shares of any company in any sector while being as involved (or uninvolved) as they want to be in steering the company.

I’m being brief but the point is not what the government owns, but who owns the government.

With the upsurge of socialism in the world I hope the fundamental question of who owns the state does not get obscured.

It is all to easy to think that because the people vote that the state is the equivalent of the public.

The state is the executive committee of the so called “owners” of the tools that make the tools. Paraphrasing Marx.

Maybe Bernie Sanders et.al. as “democratic socialists” can pave the way for those who grasp the need for a change of the whole state apparatus to shift and its committee of the few to a committee of the many. We have had that sort of democratic socialism here in New Zealand and it makes it even harder to see who owns what. Education, Heath, are called public services. But they compete with private services. They struggle, and health is hampered by strange aberrations like ACC, the pride of social democracy. The state is not a people’s state that is for sure.

Marx is all very well, but to effect real change Sigmund Freud’s modern tools of self-examination hold the answers

Freud is amazing. He took the mechanics of the steam engine and applied it to humans. For steam read libido. Thus he created a lexicon of what goes on “inside” and taught us to examine this engine. You can hear my tone, I’m not a Freudian! However I do think he was a genius to create the whole notion of a medicalised form of psychological wellbeing. (Ah my tone again!) I’m not as anti Freud as I sound though, what I’m against is how his philosophy was received in the culture. Freud or Marx! The great false dichotomy.

Like Stuart Brand in my last post, Freud came along just at the right time with ideology that was used to obfuscate the fact that much of the lack of wellbeing is due to the fact a few are clipping the ticket on everything we produce. That’s the economic side of the misery, the psychological side of that is that the ticket clippers determine the nature of work, the purpose of work. We become separate from what we do everyday, alienated, bereft of meaning & purpose, and we’re then encouraged to find it in consumerism. I don’t know if Freud ever said misery was all our own fault, but his work and legacy can be used to imply that.

And here is the Guardian, of all places, publishing blatantly that it is Freud not Marx that will change politics. Like we will all do therapy at $$ per hour to save the world.

I find the article offensive. Not just because of the terrible politics, but because as a psychotherapist, I, or my profession might be seen as supporting this mind numbing ideology.

2018

Now a closer look!

See the subtitle.

Access to tools.

That was inspired but sadly twisted. What if there had been no McCarthy era? What is marxism had not been brutally suppressed. What if marxism had not been confused with the bastardisation of Stalinism? What if Timothy Leary had advocated to tune in and organise!

Access to tools would have had the same meaning as ownership of the means of production.

We would not be accessing shovels and pumps and video cameras. The real tools are the technical and social processes that create things. The tools that make the tools.

So Stuart was onto something, but it was a strange mixture of hope and despair as the ethos of individualism and personal solutions predominated even as the earth was envisioned whole. It was not the guide to saving the planet that it might have been.

The wisdom on the inside cover: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So grand in its vision! So sad to think of us trying to grow veggies in our back yard as a revolutionary act.

Imagine if the ethos of love and care that was lavished onto the beauty of chisels and rolling pins was turned to re-imagining the globalising means of production. That too is a wondrous but twisted creation. Imagine if we could collaborate for our social product to be for the people and not for profit. Imagine if distribution of the product of those tools was equal. Imagine if the state, was also re-imagined as the servant of the people instead of the servant of the rich.

Lets visualise the tools on the planet… all those processes, manufacturing and media, design, health, education, distribution. Yes it would be great if we had true access!

Access to tools!

]]>http://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2018/whole-earth-catalogue-50-years/feed/16507Reminiscing the NetFuture – and notes on qualitative sciencehttp://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2018/netfuture/
http://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2018/netfuture/#respondThu, 20 Dec 2018 13:09:54 +0000http://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/?p=6497Continue reading "Reminiscing the NetFuture – and notes on qualitative science"]]>Looking at old posts I found a link to NetFuture… a zine from 2001

Look at this:

You can see, then, why it is not really such a great paradox to say, as I have often told audiences, “technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us”. Of course technology threatens us, and of course it calls for a certain resistance on our part, since it expresses our dominant tendencies, our prevailing lameness or one-sidedness. The only way we can become entire, whole, and healthy is to struggle against whatever reinforces our existing imbalance. Our primary task is to discover the potentials within ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely automatic, not reducible to computation. And the machine is a gift to us precisely because the peril in its siding with our one-sidedness forces us to strengthen the opposite side — at least it does if we recognize the peril and accept its challenge.

Can there be a qualitative science?My work on the meaning of organisms is part of a broader project: From Mechanism to a Science of Qualities. The project aims to begin characterizing the terms of a new, qualitative science. Of course, for those scientists who identify with Galileo’s commitment to a strictly quantitative science, which excludes qualities from consideration by definition, the phrase “qualitative science” will sound like a simple contradiction. And yet, in reality, there can be no science that is not qualitative; mere quantity does not give us any material content. Without qualities we have no world to try to understand. And if we must deal with qualities, then it’s far better to be aware of what we’re doing than to smuggle those qualities into our work in an undisciplined fashion while pretending we have nothing to do with them.

The story of the boy and the snake is just that — a story. I have not presented it as research. Interestingly, however, Neil Postman would blur the distinction between storytelling and research. In fact, Postman — who has been writing about educational and media issues for three decades — suggests that even the typical quantitative research in the social sciences is a form of storytelling. This research never gives us immutable laws of the sort physicists prefer to deal with. Instead,both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.

Postman illustrates his contention in various ways, one of which is as follows:A novelist — for example, D. H. Lawrence — tells a story about the sexual life of a woman — Lady Chatterley — and from it we may learn things about the secrets of some people, and wonder if Lady Chatterley’s secrets are not more common than we had thought. Lawrence did not claim to be a scientist, but he looked carefully and deeply at the people he knew and concluded that there is more hypocrisy in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. Alfred Kinsey was also interested in the sexual lives of women, and so he and his assistants interviewed thousands of them in an effort to find out what they believed their sexual conduct was like. Each woman told her story, although it was a story carefully structured by Kinsey’s questions. Some of them told everything they were permitted to tell, some only a little, and some probably lied. But when all their tales were put together, a collective story emerged about a certain time and place. It was a story more abstract than D. H. Lawrence’s, largely told in the language of statistics and, of course, without much psychological insight. But it was a story nonetheless….Its theme was not much different from Lawrence’s — namely, that the sexual life of some women is a lot stranger and more active than some other stories, particularly Freud’s, had led us to believe. (Postman, 1992) (1)

Postman allows that the researcher’s and the novelist’s stories may differ. The fiction writer creates metaphors “by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus.” Researchers, on the other hand, tend to reverse this, viewing a wider field so that “the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion.” But the interpretive role of researchers remains central, even if, as is usual, they “consent to maintain the illusion that it is their data, their procedures, their science, and not themselves, that speak.”